I'm Afraid I Can't Do That, Dave

The 70 mm re-release of 2001:A Space Odyssey is at my local theater and I went this afternoon. 

When this film was re-released in 1974, I was 12 years old. I went to the Boyd Theater in Bethlehem Pennsylvania and saw it probably a dozen or more times. It had a profound, deeply strange effect on me. How my 12 year old hyperactive self was able to sit, showing after showing, through the endlessly slow pacing is beyond me. But, at the time, I was riveted by every minute. 

Seeing the film in the theater again today, it was as if my 12 year old self was sitting next to me. But my 50 something self was watching as well, and seeing some completely different things. Recognizing, for example, that this film, set 17 years ago, was so optimistic about our boundless technological prowess. That there are no scenes of what is going on, on Earth, nor any mention of anything related to Earth life, other than Floyd Heywood's phone call to his daughter. That maybe my early sense of extremely dry satire arose in part from the film's juxtaposition of humans and Hal. That the film is 100% racist and sexist, with nary a person of color to be seen and no women in any central role, not even any women astronauts. 

My 12 year old self was enthralled again, and kept saying, wow, here comes a cool part. Oh yeah, I love this part. Hey, old man, watch this! Oh no, not this part, so suspenseful!

But I also noted that a lot of what I thought was cool when I was 12 was truly harrowing and disturbing to my older self. There was a much greater sense of the hellish isolation of the crew members on the Jupiter mission. Of the weird, officious and hollow lives of all the bureaucrats. And I also felt, quite sharply, my pangs of pragmatism when I knew my 12 year old self believed all of it, thought all of it was definitely possible if not even inevitable, and that 2001 was an incredibly long time into the future. Some of what we've done technologically is more advanced, at least in style, than what is featured in the film, but for the most part, we still seem more like the hominids in the prologue than the sophisticated, rational and intelligent humans in space. 

I still marvel at the story, the special effects, the timing and Kubrick's impeccable sense of art. But it's sad, really, to fast forward more than 40 years in my own life and more than 40 years in the history of our benighted species, and feel acutely, on both counts, the ravages of time. How much of our incredible potential is wasted on war, oligarchy, racism, sexism and regression. Getting and spending, our whole species lays waste its powers. Incredible things have occurred, it's true, since 1974, but I'm feeling, pessimistically, that we are quite stuck now.